Product Owner

Role summary

Candidate will own the functional direction of the HCM, Recruit and Payroll products. You turn customer, market and compliance needs into a clear roadmap and well-defined backlog, and work daily with engineering, QA, UX and pre-sales to ship features that customers adopt.

Key responsibilities

Product vision and roadmap

• Define and maintain the product vision and 1218 month roadmap for HCM, Recruit ,Exit Management and Payroll.
• Prioritise features using customer value, revenue impact, compliance deadlines and effort.
• Track competitors (e.g. SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle HCM, Workday, Darwinbox, Zoho People/Recruit) and identify gaps and differentiators.

Functional ownership across the hire-to-retire cycle

• Recruit: requisitions and approvals, job posting and portal integrations, candidate pipeline, interview scheduling, assessments, offer management and onboarding hand-off.
• Core HR: organisation structure, employee master, positions, lifecycle events (transfer, promotion, separation), documents and self-service.
• Time and attendance, leave, shifts and holiday calendars.
• Payroll: pay structures, earnings and deductions, arrears, loans, final settlement, and statutory compliance (e.g. PF, ESI, PT, TDS for India; WPS, gratuity and end-of-service for GCC).
• Performance, learning and HR analytics as the roadmap expands.

Backlog and delivery

• Act as Product Owner in Agile/Scrum: write epics and user stories with clear acceptance criteria, groom the backlog, and join sprint planning, reviews and retros.
• Produce functional specifications, process flows, business rules and wireframes.
• Validate delivered features through UAT and sign off releases.
• Manage dependencies with integrations (biometric devices, job boards, banks, accounting/ERP, SSO).

Customer and market input

• Run discovery with customers, implementation teams and support to capture pain points and enhancement requests.
• Support pre-sales on complex functional questions and RFP responses.
• Turn statutory and regulatory changes into timely product updates.

AI and innovation

• Identify AI use cases such as resume parsing and matching, candidate ranking, HR chatbots, attrition prediction and payroll anomaly detection.

Go-to-market and enablement

• Prepare release notes, product documentation and training for sales, implementation and support teams.
• Define and track product KPIs and adoption metrics.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, HR or Business; MBA (HR/Systems) preferred.
• 710 years in HR technology, with at least 3 years as a Product Owner, Product Manager or Functional Lead.
• Deep functional knowledge of HCM, recruitment and payroll processes, including statutory payroll in at least one country.
• Hands-on Agile/Scrum experience; skilled in Jira, Azure DevOps or similar.
• Ability to write clear user stories, BRDs/FRDs and process flows (Visio, Lucidchart, Figma or similar).
• Working understanding of SaaS architecture, APIs, workflows and role-based security.
• Strong analytical, communication and stakeholder-management skills.

Nice to have

• CSPO, PSPO or SAFe POPM certification.
• Experience with SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle HCM, Workday, Darwinbox or similar platforms.
• Multi-country payroll experience (India and GCC).
• Exposure to AI/ML features in HR products and SQL for data validation.